- From: John Graybeal <graybeal@mbari.org>
- Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 16:45:09 -0800
- To: Michael Lang <michaelalang@gmail.com>
- Cc: "Peter Ansell" <ansell.peter@gmail.com>, cshankey@reinvent.com, "Michael F Uschold" <uschold@gmail.com>, semantic-web@w3.org, "aldo gangemi" <aldo.gangemi@gmail.com>, "Peter Mika" <pmika@yahoo-inc.com>, "Ora Lassila" <ora.lassila@nokia.com>, "Dr Jeff Z. Pan" <jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk>, "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@csail.mit.edu>, "Frank van Harmelen" <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl>, "sean bechhofer" <sean.bechhofer@manchester.ac.uk>, "Michael Lang(Jr.)" <michaelallenlang@gmail.com>
On Nov 6, 2008, at 2:38 PM, Michael Lang wrote:
> If an ontology is being used by a community to build a description
> of a domain and accumulate facts about the domain, then the concept
> of versions is obsolete. The ontology by definition changes over
> time and becomes more valuable the more it changes.
So this is saying that no one in the community that's building said
description wants any of the following:
- a record of when facts were entered and by whom
- a record of when facts were changed and by whom
- an ability to compare facts as of today to facts at a historical
time
- an ability to see what has changed that might have caused their
inference engine to break today when it was working yesterday
- an ability to easily recognize when they need to re-read the
ontologies that are being used in their analyses
...
The ability to see where you were yesterday (and revert to it if
necessary) is fundamental to software engineering, I thought it would
be equally fundamental to knowledge engineering (sorry if that isn't
the appropriate term here -- I am referring to any inferencing using
distributed resources).
On Nov 6, 2008, at 4:28 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:
> What this discussion has made clear to me is the existence of two
> very different kind of use cases and cultures. Those that are Web
> 2.0 ish, open and dynamic, which may never be used for mission-
> critical systems and more closed systems
I do not agree that 'open and dynamic' and 'mission critical' are
mutually exclusive, or perhaps more to the point, that versioning is
in any way exclusive of 'open and dynamic'. I cite wikipedia as my
reference example of versioning in a highly dynamic and open
environment.
John
--------------
John Graybeal <mailto:graybeal@mbari.org> -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org
Received on Friday, 7 November 2008 00:45:58 UTC